Tag Archives: Action

Bethesda’s Prey launches this week and you might be wondering what to upgrade if you’re playing it on PC. Prey bucks the trend of Bethesda’s partner studios once again, and this time makes use of Crytek’s CryEngine to power it. With the game’s unique visuals, ample amounts of tesselation, and a dramatically different art style from Arkane Studios, it’s going to be quite a bit more difficult to run for most computers as opposed to Dishonored 2, which used Arkane’s Void Engine. Hit the jump for more.

If any of you were reading reviews here in 2012 and you cared about reboots of classic games, then you might recall how I bitched about Double Dragon Neon for various reasons, but said that it was basically alright.

My main point of contention was the developer at the time, WayForward Technologies, took out some of my favourite moves and added in a really out of place “magic move” system. Well it turns out that at some point, the license passed to Arc System Works, of all studios, the creators of Guilty Gear, and the game they recently released might have been a step too far in the other direction.

Why don’t more developers put out demos? The demo for the Mortal Kombat reboot (2011) won me back after I’d given up on the series after the abysmal MK vs DC Universe. The demo for Vanquish sold me on a game with no history. I’m definitely buying Nier: Automata on the strength of the demo currently on PSN – and having played both the alpha and beta demos for Nioh repeatedly, the wait for the game’s release was killing me.

Mafia III is not a very good game. It’s almost a good game, but it never quite manages to wrench itself out of mediocrity. This is a pity considering the game’s location and time period. You play as Lincoln Clay, an African American returning home to New Orleans after doing service in Vietnam. Upon returning home to his adopted family, the New Orleans black mob, Lincoln crosses paths with the Marcano mafia family. As can be expected, things soon go belly up and Lincoln is thrust into a revenge narrative that treads familiar video game grounds.

It’s 1968, so New Orleans is a muggy pot of racism and crime. The game is prefaced by a big warning that it contains all sorts of racism in order to remain authentic to this particular period in American Deep South history. You can expect copious derogatory words for basically any character that isn’t a white American. Sadly, there’s never really any deeper tackling of race issues, and even protagonist Lincoln Clay remains obstinately in the one-dimensional, revenge-fuelled character camp. It’s a great pity, because I can count on one hand the amount of times we’ve been presented with a AAA title with a person of colour as the lead character. There’s this enormous space to tell a story with thematic layers of racial identity and prejudice, but Mafia III never seems brave enough to jump in with both feet; it sort of splashes around the shallow end, never getting itself completely immersed in sensitive subject matter that would have quite successfully buoyed the game up and out of the “just another GTA clone” realms of thought.

Following up on the last batch of class-specific trailers for Ubisoft’s For Honor, a new trio of trailers has launched to show off another three warrior classes, one each from the Samurai, Knight and Viking factions.

Things to watch

Important stuff

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